What's it worth to ya?

The thrust of the right appears to be that it distrusts civilization. It’s every man for himself. If you’re not ruthless you deserve to starve. Government is bad. Too much education is bad. As long as I have my gun inside my gated community all the rest of you can go to hell, unless we need to use you in spontaneous grassroots displays that help to hold back any kind of social justice.

No matter that the right’s financial religion depends entirely on a flawed (because abusable) abstraction created by this civilization they disdain, intended to serve people. This mere tool became revered and worshipped as a god for those with a particular mindset, one that seems to go hand in hand with militarism, slavery, and other acquisitive/dominatorial preoccupations. Social justice is poison to them because there’s no private profit or hierarchy in it.

Their belief is that if someone can’t buy something, then he doesn’t deserve it (like medical insurance). So the slacker who wins the lottery deserves every little thing he buys with his winnings, while the worker whose job gets outsourced and he loses his medical insurance, gets sick and loses his house and car,-doesn’t deserve anything? That means that people are deemed intrinsically worthless, except for the dollars they have in their pocket. Inarguably, inarguably that’s pathological.

It’s like the difference in perception between the left and the right on, say, saving whales from extinction. To the left, whales are part of an intricate and interconnected ecosystem, intrinsically worth preserving. To the right, whales are of no value, simply because no one has succeeded in claiming ownership of them who can set a price on them. No one, nothing has any value until some rightie owns it and sets his arbitrary price on it. As if he could possibly have any say in the worth of anything. As if his opinion, his ego, his judgment, his say, makes the sun rise in the east. The lethal arrogance of that proprietary belief defies understanding or forgiveness.

Afraid of losing their stuff, afraid of someone else doing better, afraid of someone taking their stuff, afraid that someone will get to the stuff first, afraid that people not like them might want to be like them (or at least enjoy the same level of economic safety), and so on...

They see everything in the world as limited - and everything as some kind of "capital" - and therefore, they must hoard and fence up and control. Except, as you so brilliantly noted, the stuff that no one has put a price on yet - whales, spotted owls, and so on.

I would also add that they believe that once something HAS a price put on it, that it MUST then enter the market - and so sequoias MUST be cut down because, wow, that's a lot of money and only a lefty commie America-hater would want to keep people from earning a living.